The reshaping of Ibero-American cultural diplomacy in the beginning of the XXI century: the declining of the Spanish historical hegemony?

ABSTRACT

Francoist cultural policy in Latin America – itself based on Hispanist philosophy – and the Spanish activity in the Organization of Ibero-American States (1949) promoted the emergence of Ibero-American cultural diplomacy. The return of democracy to Spain in 1978 turned these projects into more horizontal instruments of cultural cooperation. After a process of institutionalization that led to the creation of SEGIB and the establishment of the Ibero-American Cultural Letter in 2006, this multilateral diplomatic system was called into question due to its economic asymmetries and its ideological basis. However, the relative influence of this process in reformulating the system and in creating a shared identitarian discourse within Ibero-America has never been properly weighted, nor has the importance of each actor within this process. This article analyses the multilateral Ibero-American cultural diplomacy in order to understand its recent transformations in terms of the importance of both national power and symbolic hegemony.     

论白马藏族神话的主要类型和述说特征——以陇南为中心

白马藏族神话,就是用口头白马语为载体,以耳听、心记的方式向后传承留存至今的本族神话作品,主要类型有:创世神话、人源神话、神灵神话、英雄神话等。经考察发现,白马藏族神话最为发达的是英雄神话,其中的代表作《阿尼嘎萨》流传千余年,长达十余万言,堪比蒙、藏等族的《格萨尔》,展现了白马藏族民间故事和口传活态文化的最高成就,值得学界重视。白马藏族神话表现出独到的述说特征:整体表现为口头传承过程由"信以为真"向信众逐步散失的转变与题材的不规则演化,述说体系虽零散杂乱且缺乏整一严谨性,但又有其独特之处。     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

论我国文化产业的政策目标

政策目标是否科学、合理,是产业政策取得成功的前提条件。目前,学术界对文化产业政策还缺乏足够的重视,如何设定文化产业政策目标?如何使文化产业政策目标科学、合理、具有更强的指导性?这些无疑是目前亟待研究的课题。     

Cultural policy as development policy: evidence from the United States

Cultural policies and cultural projects in the United States have been reframed to emphasize their economic benefits to cities. New alliances between arts advocates and place promoters are apparent at all levels, but are most prominent locally. These new alliances are facilitated by the changing interests of local officials and business people, who have come to believe there is economic value in the arts and of arts administrators, for whom attracting broader public support has become imperative. In some cities, entirely new organizational structures have sprung up to plan and implement projects that serve cultural and economic development advocates simultaneously. Such new institutions are most prominent in more economically disadvantaged cities.     

Presidential Appeals to Moral Foundations: How Modern Presidents Persuade Cross‐Ideologues

Many assume that modern presidents cannot persuade cross‐ideologues to support their policy proposals. The idea that a conservative would support a liberal policy advocated by a cross‐partisan president seems ludicrous. However, recent research suggests that conservatives will support liberal policies that are framed consistent with moral foundations. Using a national survey experiment that carefully manipulates the actual text of a speech given by President Obama, this article demonstrates that fairness frames in presidential speeches motivate liberal policy support among conservative, moderate, and liberal Americans who value fairness.     

A Narrative Policy Framework: Clear Enough to Be Wrong?

Narratives are increasingly subject to empirical study in a wide variety of disciplines. However, in public policy, narratives are thought of almost exclusively as a poststructural concept outside the realm of empirical study. In this paper, after reviewing the major literature on narratives, we argue that policy narratives can be studied using systematic empirical approaches and introduce a “Narrative Policy Framework” (NPF) for elaboration and empirical testing. The NPF defines narrative structure and narrative content. We then discuss narrative at the micro level of analysis and examine how narratives impact individual attitudes and hence aggregate public opinion. Similarly, we examine strategies for the studying of group and elite behavior using the NPF. We conclude with seven hypotheses for researchers interested in elaborating the framework.     

The Narrative Uses of Evidence

When scientific evidence is used in policy controversies, it is always embedded in narrative stories. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is an empirical framework used to study the role of narratives in public policy. While the NPF has considered the relationship between evidence and narratives from different angles, it has not used a consistent approach in examining how evidence is embedded in narratives. This article develops a categorization of narrative uses of evidence. A narrative use of evidence is defined by the different roles that evidence plays in the plot of a narrative depending on which narrative element is addressed by a given piece of evidence. To distinguish different narrative uses of evidence, the article examines how competing coalitions use the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study in Swiss direct‐democratic campaigns on school policy. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of newspaper articles and governmental documents show how evidence may relate to all main narrative elements and may play different roles in the plot of a narrative. The findings demonstrate significant differences in the narrative uses of PISA between coalitions related to the story types and narrative strategies that each coalition uses. Finally, the implications for future NPF research are discussed.     

Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories

In this article, I explore the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a site through which social memories are transmitted and connected to the realities of Argentina’s present. The conjuncture or disjuncture between people’s direct and individual memories of the past, their memory of the society’s collective past, and the “official” history can be used as a prism for seeing how power, and resistance, work through and reinforce a complex political economy. By giving testimony and re‐contextualizing the events of the dictatorship, the Mothers have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones. Furthermore, the present‐day activism and goals of the Mothers, as individuals and as a collective, are based on political commitments that have arisen in great part out of maternal relationships and maternal memories. Their maternal memories have led to a re‐signification of neoliberalism as a type of structural violence.     

Communicating Climate Change: Are Stories Better than “Just the Facts”?

Postpositive policy scholarship has long asserted the importance of narratives—or stories—in shaping public policy through public opinion. In part, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was developed to empirically test this assertion. To assess the relationship between policy narratives and public opinion, NPF posits several causal mechanisms including narrative transportation. Narrative transportation is a measure used to assess the extent to which individuals exposed to a story are “transported” into that story. NPF hypothesizes that as narrative transportation increases the reader of the story will (i) have more positive affect for characters within the story; and (ii) will find the story more persuasive. Using an online experiment involving a nationally representative sample of over 1,700 respondents, this research tests narrative transportation hypotheses by exposing subjects to one of three Cultural Theory narratives about climate change, as well as a control list of scientifically agreed upon facts. While findings do not support that narratives are any more transportive than fact lists in terms of directly persuading respondents to accept specific climate change policies, the data do show that narrative transportation positively influences affect for hero characters, which extant research demonstrates indirectly influences the persuasiveness of a story.     

Who governs culture? Actors,federalism and expertise in Swiss regional cultural policy

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a novel approach to cultural policies and cultural policy change, drawing on public policy and institutional analysis to study how decision-making power is distributed between actors in the public and private sectors and at different state levels, as well as the precise roles of public administrations, elected officials and cultural actors. Indeed, rather than directly defining cultural policy, laws on culture mostly designate actors in charge of policy implementation. Based on an empirical application of this analytical framework to the case of Swiss cantons and focusing specifically on the positions of cultural actors, findings show that cultural policies are transformed in different ways, affording more or less power to actors from the cultural sector in implementation arrangements generally dominated by administrative actors.     

Changing philosophies of action? Argentine’s cultural policies in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

How can the many institutional and ideological changes of Argentine cultural policy at the beginning of the 21st century be explained? This paper analyses how representations of culture, programs and public actions are translated into different ‘philosophies of action’ depending on the political stripe of each government and the agents of cultural policy. If the predominant philosophy of action during the whole period is ‘culture as an economic resource’, it coexists with other philosophies: ‘culture as show’, ‘a communication tool’, ‘social inclusion’ and finally ‘a factor of citizenship’.     

A centralised market orientation: the implicit determinants of Finnish cultural policy in 1990–2010

This article examines the reactions of Finnish cultural policy to the neoliberal turn in its societal environment. The analysis of cultural policy documents in 1990–2010 concentrates on three particular elements of societal change: the reforms in public management, the reorientations in international relations and the paradigm of immaterial production. It is argued here that besides the mythical democratic pluralism of the Nordic welfare states, cultural policy treats newcomers to the political arena selectively. Consequently, the system, constructed originally for protecting free artistic expression and equal distribution of cultural possibilities, has been in the front line of political market orientation in Finland. The orientation is modelled rhetorically after the ideas of cultural pluralism and economic efficiency; in practice, the fight has been a technocratic one between different notions of governmental responsibilities. This mechanism stresses formal procedures at the expense of ad hoc negotiations, leading to a centralised market orientation.     

Competition or exhibition? The Olympic arts and cultural policy rhetoric

Though they are widely forgotten today, the modern Olympic Games once offered competitive medals for art. This tradition, which lasted through the seven summer Games held from 1912 to 1948, found artists competing for gold much as athletes do now. These artists represented their nation in judged competitive events showcasing artistic works. In its initial form, the ‘pentathlon of the muses,’ as it was called, included competitive events in Architecture, Musical Composition, Sculpture, Painting, and Literature. This paper considers the history of these arts competitions and their eventual demise as a study in cultural policy, arguing that no understanding of cultural policy is sufficient unless it considers the rhetorical factors that contribute to its formation. Without abandoning the Foucauldian backbone of cultural-policy studies, this argument makes an interdisciplinary plea to open cultural policy studies to the field of rhetorical scholarship, which it has almost wholly neglected to date.